The Senate report on CIA torture techniques may only be the beginning. Soon there may be pictures.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

The Obama administration is withholding hundreds, perhaps even thousands of photographs showing the U.S. government’s brutal treatment of detainees, meaning that revelations about detainee abuse could well continue, possibly compounding the outrage generated by the Senate “torture report” now in the public eye. 

Some photos show American troops posing with corpses; others depict U.S. forces holding guns to people’s heads or simulating forced sodomization. All of them could be released to the public, depending on how a federal judge in New York rules—and how hard the government fights to appeal. The government has a Friday deadline to submit to that judge its evidence for why it thinks each individual photograph should continue to be kept hidden away. 

The photographs are part of a collection of thousands of images from 203 investigations into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan and represent one of the last known secret troves of evidence of detainee abuse. While the photos show disturbing images from the Bush administration’s watch, it is the Obama administration that has allowed them to remain buried—all with the help of a willing Congress. 

The president may have entered office promising a new era of transparency—and was even prepared to release at least 21 of the photos in 2009. But Obama pulled back at the last minute at the urging of his top commander in Iraq, who worried the graphic images could generate a backlash against U.S. troops.

The possibility that terrorists might get angry enough to launch an attack on American troops of embassies overseas in response to anything released to the public concerning our torture of detainees is bullshit.

As others have said we are actively bombing the crap out of ISIL. If THAT has not convinced them to attack us it is hard to believe that a couple of reports or photos will push them over the edge.

However it just might cause the conservatives defending CIA torture to suddenly go quiet.

One of the reasons that the incident in Abu Ghraib grabbed the public's attention was that the American people were able to see what we were doing and they were disgusted.

I think the same thing will happen this time.

Which in my opinion would be a good thing, and would do much to ensure that we never revisited this type of inhuman treatment again.

In other words, bring-em on.

Benghazi might not be over as an issue in 2016 after all. At least not if Rand Paul has anything to say about it.

Courtesy of The Hill:  

Paul, a likely 2016 presidential contender, criticizes potential rival Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of State during the attacks, and vows to seek the truth about Benghazi. 

"This new Benghazi ‘intelligence’ report is little more than a C.Y.A. attempt designed to protect incompetent politicians and government agents at the expense of justice for the victims of September 11, 2012," Paul writes in an op-ed for Breitbart, a conservative website, using an acronym for "cover your ass." 

The report in question was issued by the House Intelligence Committee before Thanksgiving, and counters several claims made by some Republicans critical of the Obama administration's handling of the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi. 

The report found that "there was no intelligence failure prior to the attacks," "no evidence" of a stand down order to U.S. personnel responding to the assault and no CIA operation to secretly ship arms from Benghazi to Syria. 

Paul expresses skepticism at the report’s findings.

Now this is important because lately Rand Paul has been working pretty hard to portray himself as far less wingnutty than we know him to be. (Remember Paul has a fifteen year relationship with professional lunatic Alex Jones, and was once a frequent guest on his radio show.)

So for Paul to ignore the fact that this is just the latest of several investigations into Benghazi, all of which turned up no evidence of malfeasance on the part of the White House, nor any attempt to launch a coverup.

Now personally I expected certain individual to speak out against these findings, and so they have including Senator Lindsey Graham ("Full of crap!"), former Congressman Allen West, and various other Right Wing types. However I thought that Rand Paul was attempting to resist the conspiratorial whispers from the voices in his head and continue straightening his hairpiece and trying to play the grownup.

However I believe I may have given him too muhc credit. Take a look at how he justifies his reticence in accepting the findings of the report: 

"None of these accusations contain even a modicum of truth?" he asked. 

He points to a Fox News report that U.S. security personnel said the top CIA officer in Benghazi prevented them from responding faster, and to multiple articles on arms smuggling from Libya to Syria. 

"The Obama Administration has tried to paint members of Congress who ask these questions as somehow being extreme or crazy — and perhaps the House Intelligence Committee will now follow suit," Paul writes. "But remember, this is the same administration that called the investigation into the IRS scandal a product of a 'conspiracy theory.' "

So to support his faith that there really is a Benghazi scandal, despite the fact that his has been debunked, Paul turns to the IRS "scandal," which has also been debunked.

Awesome plan.